Blood and Desire: Collaborating through Arousal

In 1970 Amanda Feilding drilled a hole in her head to access a blissful state. These actions were captured in her multi-media artwork, Trepanation for the National Health (1978). Meanwhile, Penny Slinger sought ecstatic liberation through self-exorcism. This resulted in her feminist surrealist, sexually transgressive, autobiographical photo-collage series, An Exorcism (1969–77). Challenging the male-centric histories of the British counterculture, this chapter maps Slinger and Feilding’s fearless female experimentation and the tightly interwoven series of lover-collaborators led by their radical image making. It argues that these experiments facilitated ground-breaking representations of alternative states of being, gender, sexuality, and arousal.